Google and Facebook account for much of consumer time online... but they are not the only gatekeepers of attention and influence, nor can marketers who spend 90%+ of their budgets and energy on these two sources alone expect to build resiliency, diversity of traffic, or competitive advantage. High costs of traffic, high competition, and low ROI are the hallmarks of efforts poured into these behemoths.
By expanding your marketing to sources like content, broader social, email, in-product marketing, webinars, podcasts, influencers, brand, PR, co-sponsorships, and more, you can dramatically improve not only your opportunities off Facebook and Google, but (ironically enough), on them, too.
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Howdy folks, I'm Rand Fishkin, co founder and CEO of SparkToro, and before that, some of you might know me from Moz, and I am here to talk about how we can end our reliance on Facebook and Google's duopoly. Now, look, I think a lot of marketers invest a ton of money, a ton of time and attention with these platforms.
They can produce returns. I'm not denying that, but I have some arguments that I think you'll find compelling. Three core arguments against relying exclusively on these two platforms. The first one is this: These are not reliable, friendly, in your corner marketing partners, right?
They're just not. You can't get the competitive advantage on Facebook and Google that you can get from other more diverse, more spread out sources. And number three, when you build brand equity in other places, these platforms, Google and Facebook specifically become better marketing channels.
The ads you place there, the organic, work that you do to rank in search engines or to get your Facebook likes to, come to your website. Those work better too. So I'm gonna dive into these three reasons. Then I'm gonna get into some strategy and some tactics.
Number one. So when I say that they're not in your corner, what I mean is that I don't know that these companies are forces for good in the world. I don't think they're good macro economically. I don't think that they are good for income inequality or, for helping us break out of our filter bubbles or all sorts of ugly externalities from them.
You know, Google uses your work, the work that you do, producing content and building websites, right, to addict people to their platform. So you went and, let's say you own one of these small businesses, small local businesses. You went and have done all this work to build up your Google My Business profile so that Google cannot send people to your website and instead get them addicted to and accustomed to visiting Google maps and Google maps profiles and good luck finding the website.
You go and create a bunch of great YouTube content, showing people how to fix a hole in the wall, for example. And what does Google do? They extract out the little clip. See that, they cut off the first thirty three seconds. They cut off the end of the video. Why did they do that?
So that you don't get any branding benefit from this. Right? They're just showing the piece of this short, short YouTube clip that you, oh, let's only watch these ninety three seconds so that you don't accidentally find out who it's from or, or get their branding.
Sucks, right? That's that's YouTube getting all the value, not you. They do this in sector after sector. Right? All of the celebrities, TV, movies, books, news, personalities, they do it in the featured snippets. Right? You make this great article about best weeding tools and Google extracts out the featured snippet and shows the list so that you don't get credit for it.
They mislead and they don't have any accountability for it. You know? So Google says, oh, keyword not provided will never be more than ten percent of searches. Course today it's ninety nine percent, right? Oh, Google treats sub domains and sub directories the same.
Yeah, but then if you move from a sub domain to a sub directory, what do you find? Oh, traffic went way up. Why could that be? Google misleading me? Yes, they were. They they lie about user signals like clicks. It sucks. The more lucrative your sector looks, by the way, the more likely it is that Google's gonna come into it.
The hotel space, flight space, jobs, credit cards, mortgage rates, speed tests, right? Internet speed tests. They're just entering sector after sector after sector and competing with the properties that we all create. And in my opinion, is essentially using their search monopoly power. Right?
They have ninety five percent of the market to unfairly compete in these other markets. They don't have to have the best job search results. They don't have to have the best hotel search results. They can just take their property and put it at the top.
They don't have to compete with the rest of us. That's no fun. Facebook is no different. Facebook used all of us to build their platform. Right? They claimed, oh, put these stickers, know, put like us on Facebook, on your menus, at your restaurants, on your walls, at your place of business, drive people to your Facebook page, because then we'll show your content to people when they come visit Facebook and we're growing so fast.
And what happened? Right? What happened? We went and made all these great pages, right? We gave them all our free labor, and now the fan bases that we built on Facebook are nearly meaningless. This is data from Rival IQ, who does a great report on social media engagement rates across brand pages every year.
And they're showing here, right, that essentially the median across all industries, zero point zero nine percent. Awful, awful. These algorithms, you know, on Facebook, on Instagram, on, other platforms that, the social media giant owns, they're optimizing for engagement. And when you optimize for engagement and addiction, you get polarization, misinformation, hate for profit.
And this is why, you know, you see a ton of, this accelerating trend in politics across the world, not just here in the United States, although especially prevalent here in the United States, that have these problems and issues. It's really dangerous. It's not good for our society.
I think we know it and we're trying to do something about it, but we just can't. People fall into these algorithmic holes because these algorithms are powerful and marketing through them is powerful. Much like income inequality, it's just a tiny fraction. A few winners get all of the traffic benefit advertising dollars, right?
And the rest of us are scrounging for scraps. Google, YouTube and Facebook alone account for more than seventy five percent of all traffic to tech sites according to SimilarWeb. That's brutal, brutal. And when they get more power, these companies, Facebook and Google in particular, lobby governments to prevent competition.
What is GDPR? GDPR is essentially, initially the EU wanted to create more privacy for their citizens and what they ended drafting, unfortunately, thanks to intervention by lawyers and experts and analysts from Google and Facebook or paid by Google and Facebook was a law that prevents anyone except Google and Facebook from ever collecting or using personally identifiable information to market and advertise to you, essentially meaning that in the EU, no one will ever compete with these properties.
That seems weird. I can't imagine why you would get together and draft a law like that, but it happened. And look, these are these are just a small sample of the problematic issues that that these platforms create. So far from alone, I don't think fundamentally, these are the partners that we want.
But let's say you're unconvinced. Let's say you think Facebook and Google are forces for good. You don't really care about the polarization. You don't care about the misinformation. You're you're not worried about income inequality. You're not worried about giving them money or power.
Okay, that's fine. We could agree to disagree. I still have two more points. I don't think it is possible to build a true competitive advantage, right? A competitive marketing advantage if you exclusively use Google and Facebook for marketing. And that is because advertising on the duopoly kind of works like this.
You buy ad impressions, right? And, and, you know, whatever sorts of advertising you do. And each of those and or the conversions costs dollars. And efforts that you might make to improve your ROI are usually counteracted by increasing competition, rising prices, changes in inventory right from these.
And when Facebook and Google need to show Wall Street some growth, you end up paying more. A great example was recently just September first. Google made a change such that your paid search ads no longer show you all the keywords that send you traffic.
And so, right, of course, this this means I think they removed about twenty eight percent of that data according to a SEER interactive piece. And those that twenty eight percent was what we used to do negative keyword matching and better exact match targeting or attempts at it.
Frustrating, right? This is what I call bolder pushing marketing. Every step of progress requires the same amount of effort. There's no gain in efficiency over time. If competition comes in, right into your space, into your advertising, or external forces reduce ROI, every step gets harder and harder.
The opposite of that is using a marketing flywheel, which can create a competitive advantage, but it's really tough to do if you only have Google and Facebook, right? The idea behind that is you do a marketing thing, you boost that things reach, you engage and grow your audience, then you improve your algorithmic signals, right?
The tweet you sent reaches more Twitter users, the email you sent, you now have more subscribers, the Google rankings you earned got more links, and so now it's gonna be easier to rank in the future. And so you get higher return on investment next time.
And this is not easy, if it's even possible with exclusively Google and Facebook, because their dominance in their respective, you know, social media advertising and search advertising fields, make it such that they have pricing power over the market. They can determine how costly it is for you to attract traffic.
And of course, your competitors as well, especially if they're earning higher returns or doing other sorts of marketing things that can price you out. You are also on these duopolies. You're competing with everyone, right? Every single company out there, every marketing agency out there, every search expert, every social expert, they are all on these platforms.
It doesn't matter what you're looking for. I literally ran a search for, you're gonna run ads for this on Google and yep, TikTok is advertising for that, right? Because they're putting out there. On alternative channels, Spark Toro is in the market research and audience intelligence field.
I found this great research live website. They have two advertisers and they take op eds too. So I could get my message onto this platform and not compete with anyone except a few people who happen to find this. It's very, very different, right?
I could do an email newsletter sponsorship with them and get reached the eleven thousand market researchers who subscribe to research life. That's an incredible ROI. And the competition is much, much lower than it's going be if I'm bidding against Google and Facebook. It's unique, it stands out, it gives me the potential for competitive advantage.
It's also true that most marketers value really trackable investments instead of high return on investment ones. So let's say you go find a podcast that reaches the audience that you wanna reach, which is awesome. And you pitch to be on that podcast or you sponsor it or run a co branding arrangement, whatever it is.
When someone hears about you on that podcast, what happens? They go to Google, they search and Google gets the credit, not the podcast, Google. Now granted, there are some ways to work around this, Time series tracking and brand lift and all those kinds of things, but it's hard.
It's tough to do it that way, Right? And so if you wanna make marketing a core strength, one that gives you a competitive advantage over the rest of the players in your field, you need to invest where others don't in ways that they won't with generally harder to attribute, but increasing return on investment.
That's how you get there. That's how you get there. And Google and Facebook alone just just can't provide that. Number three, if I haven't convinced you yet, my last argument is if you are going to be spending a lot of money on Google and Facebook, putting a bunch of effort into that, let me still encourage you to look elsewhere outside of these two platforms, because they become better channels when you invest in growing your brand.
I'll show you what I mean with a story. So I am a little obsessed with pasta, probably more than a little obsessed with pasta. And a couple years ago, I visited Genoa, which is in Italy and the birthplace of pesto, is one of my favorite pastas.
And so I try it there, I loved it, I come back to the States, I wanna make it at home. So I go and I read the Siri Seeds article from Daniel Gritzer here about how to make great pesto. According to you need a mortar and pestle.
Specifically, I think he was recommending one from this this firm, Novo Marmotechnica. Okay. You know, whatever. So I keep looking around and browsing like, alright, I don't want I don't have a giant mortar and pestle. Is there some way to make it with a food processor or something?
So here I am. Oh, let's see. Kitchen detail says, Marmotecnica. Alright. Apparently, I need this this mortar and pestle from this company, Marmotecnica. By brand impression number sixteen, again, this is a small kitchen's website, they also recommended the Nuovo Marmotechnica, mortar and pestle.
Jeez. Alright. Fine. You know what? I'll give you two hundred and twenty dollars for that silly pesto rock and stick. And I sure enough, I did order one. You can see my, my order in my email there and had it delivered. And, it's pretty magical.
It's a lot of work. Like making pesto is a lot of work by hand, but it's pretty fun. You do sweat and, it's good for your arms, but it makes delicious, delicious pesto. So what happened here? Right? Essentially, this brand, Nuovo Marmotecnica, built up brand affinity by being in all these places across my search and social and content consumption journey, Right?
And as I was learning more and more about pesto, I kept seeing them mentioned. And so now when I do a search for mortar for pesto, And hey, wait a minute. I know that brand, Nuova Marmotecnica. That's the one that everybody talks about.
I do not pay for the thirty centimeter, six eighty one, but that's someone recommended on all the Italian recipe sites, right? Brands that only invest in ads and don't have this coverage and get brand impressions and build affinity, they're like BF cart, no offense to BF cart, but I've never heard of them.
So my likelihood of clicking on them or converting is extremely low compared to the brand that I've heard of, even though it's, you know, twenty times the price. The more you put into other channels, the better Google and Facebook ads perform. So let's talk about how to expand beyond these places.
It's it's really remarkably simple. I'll get into the tactics, but really, it truly is. You want to figure out who are your customers? Do they have describable characteristics? Do they have job titles? Do they have interests and passions? Do they talk about things online? Who are they?
What are the messages that resonate with them? Right? What's gonna help them get over the border from, I have heard of you, I'm aware of you, oh, I'm interested in you, oh, I think I might buy from you. What are the sources that influence that audience?
What publications do they read and pay attention to? Who do they follow and trust online? What podcasts do they listen to? What YouTube channels they subscribe to? What events do they go to? What webinars do they watch? Right? All of those things. Okay. And where do they engage?
Where can I find them and reach them through those sources of influence? And finally, I need to amplify the messages that I learned worked in the places that my audience pays attention. It's not that hard, right? This is marketing one hundred one. But if you do this outside of Google and Facebook, Google and Facebook themselves will work way better.
So let me walk you through some tactical tips for how to do some of this work. First off, I strongly recommend whenever you can using other people's platforms to drive traffic to your website. Right? So if you have the option, you're mentioning your business on your podcast, on a podcast, you are getting a magazine article, you're writing an op ed for someone, you are being mentioned in someone's blog, someone's talking about you on social, whatever it is, right?
Whatever activity you're doing, do you want to drive people to your website? Right? Let's say you are doing marketing for the Inn at Langley, or do you want to drive them to your Google My Business page? And my recommendation is send them to your website.
There's only two marketing channels that you truly own and control your website and your email list. Everything else is out of your control, or not completely within it. And so I would urge you to drive everything from other people's platforms back to those.
You wanna learn where and how your audience's buyer journey starts. Right? So when it comes to, you know, if I'm running a hotel like the Inn at Langley, and I'm doing marketing for them, well, where do people start to have the experience around that?
There's sort of the early journey, like my early journey with pesto, Of, oh, well, people think about getaways and weekend trips. And now that it's during quarantine and coronavirus, right? It's what's where's a safe vacation spot. And then I wanna find the publications that either trigger or nudge along those journeys, right?
So that could be, I search Google News, or I use a tool like BuzzSumo to try and find that BuzzSumo didn't actually return great results. This case, I think the keywords just didn't surface that stuff, but Google News surface a lot of good sources.
And then I wanna find where my audience pays attention. So this is SparkToro, you could use other tools for this as well. So I looked at, okay, people who talk about Whidbey Island, what do they visit? What do they read? What are they engaging with?
And turns out, you know, no surprise, right? It's a bunch of news websites, travel related websites, a lot of stuff around Seattle and King County, which is which is near to the Inn at Langley, brands like Alaska Airlines and Whidbey Coffee. Great. Awesome.
This is this is where I can reach an audience who talks about that topic. I also recommend I really like using your own analytics, right? Diving into your analytics, or if you're doing marketing for someone else, their analytics, and looking at the sources that previously worked.
So if I see right in here that, oh, yes, sweet. Look at that. Free account. You know, my goal that I set up in GA is showing that this was a really good traffic source. Boom. I can plug that into a service like SimilarWeb, which is free by the way.
You can go to SimilarWeb, plug in a website, and it will show you other similar sites visited by visitors to that website. SimilarWeb is tracking that through clickstream data. I really like it. You wanna then go use, I don't have time to get into them all here, but I did write a blog post about this.
I urge you to check it out with a bunch of unusual, but highly effective outreach tips, like ways to go after whatever it is that you're seeking coverage or the opportunity to write or pitch so that you can get into these platforms that reach your audience.
Number two, if you're going to be buying ads, you're gonna be spending money on whatever it is, Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or LinkedIn or Reddit or any of these. I highly recommend that you know your audience better than your competition. So one of the ways to do this is to get some basic stats with a survey.
We ran a survey for SparkToro, you know, asking our free users, and customers, what did you what are your what does your organization do? How would you describe your role? Right? So now we're getting into the, okay. This person's a marketing analyst. This person's a principal trainer on sales, marketing, and accounting.
This is someone who works at consulting firm. This is, you know, how did you first hear about SparkToro? Oh, they heard about it on a webinar. Oh, look at that. Look at it on a webinar right now. Right? And then we ask them how they would describe it to people.
You don't have to do let's see. I really like adding to your survey data interviews as well, because you get the color from the personal connection and relationship that you can't get with a survey alone. So, you know, I go to my local Jewish deli, it's schmaltzes and I say like, oh, well, you know, they can ask me what brought you in today?
What have you tried before? What did you like? What do you wanna do with delivery? You can ask these questions over video interviews, over calls, you can ask them over emails. I do this all the time with SparkToro's free users, right? They'll reply to an email from me and I'll say like, hey, yeah, tell me about things that resonated with you.
Audience intelligence tools can help too. So again, I'm showing SparkToro, but you could use something like Audience, or helixa dot ai, or other kinds of things. But essentially, you know, I wanna see what my audience talks about, how they describe themselves, what words and phrases appear in their profiles and bios, what are the hashtags that they use online, what are the words and phrases that they use, where do they visit?
Advertising. And then you can plug that information that you learn from surveys, from interviews, from audience intelligence into your advertising tools so that your targeting is better, more refined, more exact, more opportunities to experiment with different groups than what your competitors are doing.
Pretty smart. Number three, if you want to draw traffic off of the social sites, right? And into, or YouTube or even Google, right? And onto your website, my recommendation, the way it is working right now today is engagement streaks. That is what, social platforms and algorithms, machine learning algorithms are rewarding primarily.
So basically, so we you know, you can see, the basic story here is that we're trying to give the networks what they want, what their algorithms are seeking, so that they will show our content to more and more of our following over and over again.
This is, from my Twitter analytics. Right? I'll show you some Facebook too. You know, these networks are really similar. LinkedIn works like this. Facebook works like this. Instagram works like this. Twitter works like this. Content that keeps users on the platform. I does not contain a link, That that tends to be the preference Twitter.
You can see it very easily that they'll show that to more folks posts that earn either replies or repeat visits and clicks. So if you are asking folks to like help you share a piece of content on a social network, my advice is don't ask for a, you know, two, three years ago, I would have said, ask for a retweet or a share on Facebook or a repost or whatever.
Now I would say, for a comment, especially an engaging comment. And see visual and video works really well, which I'm sure all of you know, shocking headlines work really well, emotional stuff, surprising and unexpected stuff. These are our concepts that work really well in in and followers too.
Right? So this is my Facebook analytics and you can see, consistency of focus. Unfortunately, I don't actually take this advice myself, but it is the case that people followed you for a particular reason. And if you deviate from the initial reason that they think they followed you, you tend to lose engagement.
So if you're building that up in a brand side, be aware of that. High controversy, especially belief reinforcing high controversy content tends to earn amplification following. This is precisely why the polarization of politics stuff that I talked about earlier is so effective. Easy to consume, easy to process.
So shorter, more visual, more emotional, that all tends to work really well in social too. The idea here is that we're gonna engage, draw traffic, and repeat. So I do a high engagement, nonpromotional post, another one, then I might use some of that and do a promotion, then a high engagement, nonpromotional post, nonpromotional post.
These ones, right, in blue are designed to earn brand exposure and new followers for me. And this one is capitalizing on the algorithmic reputation I built up to send traffic back to my site. Number four, viral worthy brandable visuals. I'm sure all of you in marketing have seen, e marketers work, right?
That that red, black, and gray, worked really, really well. The love this from Liz and Molly who wrote, the book, no hard feelings, which I think I have a copy. Yeah. Yeah. Look at that. Hey. There's No No Hard Feelings. Terrific book. Again, using visuals, branded visuals so that you have this familiarity association with them.
This is Food fifty two who does the same thing. These are super effective for drawing traffic from the social sites and getting amplification on them. And it works really well for small local businesses too. So this is not just a publisher centric thing.
You can you can use this in a bunch of ways. I tried a miniature version of this experiment with my own blog. So I did this sort of whiteboard series of photos that I posted along with each of the things I did. Worked quite well.
I got a, you you can see, thirty five percent lift on my, traffic drawn from Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and, Reddit. You should also number five, use the news. Use the news. Especially right now, if you're a business owner, oh my God, the news is dying to write about how you're doing in coronavirus times.
And there's a formula for this. You take a word that describes your business sector or climate, plus your city name, search for that, and you will get topics that can get you coverage. I'm learning that from from looking at the results from looking at the results here, publications that are likely to cover you and types of stories that earn coverage.
So now when I go do my PR efforts, I go do my amplification, when I try and earn press and coverage from these publications that my audience reads, I know what they want. Once you've got a topic and pitch targets, the outreach section gets way easier.
Right? Now I know how to pitch King five. I know how to pitch Como News. I know how to pitch In style or The Stranger or Cairo seven. That's the key. And thanks to feed personalization. I don't know if you saw this, but just a couple weeks ago, Google News for you section became the primary way that they are showing us stuff.
It's the default in in all of our phones now. All right. Number six, email. Oh my God. Capture every email you possibly can. Email open rates. Here's Mailchimp data versus that rival IQ data. Email open rates are two fifty times higher than Facebook page engagement.
I would rather have one email than a thousand new Facebook likes. Seriously, I would. I would take There's also huge pent up demand in consumer and in b to b right now, and as as Lily Ray showing here, and you can execute on that with emails.
That is email is a great way to build up pent up demand and then get conversions in the future. If you're a pro, an email pro, really like, and we use here at SparkToro Mailchimp and Mailgun. And if you're new to email marketing, I love tidings.
You can connect it right into your social account. It it it works beautifully well, very affordable too. Number seven, last but not least, audit those ads. You're spending a bunch of money on Google and Facebook. Don't rely on brand safety tools. They're pitching you on saving money, they're generally not.
I don't recommend those. I do recommend services like check my ads. This is from the, one of the co founders of sleeping giants. And I also love Sears tools specifically for Google called saving Benjamins. And what you can do is take the money you saved and put it toward the beyond the duopoly beyond Google and Facebook investments.
Alright. Thank you so much. The slides and links are gonna be available soon. And if you'd like, you can give, Spark Toro a spin. And my email is rand at sparktoro dot com. If you've got any questions. Thanks so much. Take care. Okay, great stuff from from around there.
I mean, a ton a ton to get through. He's covered a huge amount of ground, but we're gonna bring him in now for a chat and see if we can if we can dive into some of that. And who knows some of the stuff might come up as well.
Randy there. I am here. Howdy, Brian. Hey, how's it going? Good to see you. Good to see you too, my friend. I think we have a slight delay. So just FYI. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's all live TV. You know, we're getting used to it over here.
So I guess I'll try to be honest. This is a question that the response to be in real time. Yeah, yeah, we'll we'll, we could end up doing it on the app. So just to kick off, and it's it's kind of one of the oldest challenges maybe in web marketing, and it's your talk brought it into focus a lot.
How do you how do you get the balance between giving giving? Well, there's there's three components is what you want to say, there's what you think your audience wants to hear. And then there's giving the platforms and the algorithms what they're looking for.
That how do you how do you think about that balance? And it's a there's a there's a lot in that question. It's a whole talk, but what are your thoughts on that? So personally, I like being freed from feeling an obligation to appeal to everyone, and I think that's actually a very a very good thing for brands and for individuals who are trying to build their social presence or trying to build a content platform.
Think if you try to appeal to everyone, you will be bland and boring, and you will not take positions, you will not have enemies, you will not engage in controversy, at least not controversy that you own. And as a result, it's very hard to break through the noise.
So personally, what I like to do is find the intersection of things that I am passionate about and believe in and I'm interested in and find my audience, The people who are gonna come along with me and be part of my fan base and world and worldview and support that and maybe not get all the way there, but they're somewhat on board.
I think that works very, very well. And it is okay to exclude some people and some viewpoints in there. That's that's not a bad thing. You can you can see brands and groups and individuals building huge audiences by being willing to wade into controversial subjects and take strong positions and bring their tribe with them.
We've seen a bunch of examples of that in the tech world recently. What was the Coinbase guys, right, going that route in a way that I strongly disagree with. A guy from, what's that terrible beverage that gives you diarrhea, but intentionally Coffee. Killing me. No. No.
The the the one that's supposed to be like a, it's slim fast for tech bros. Oh, gosh. Sorry. Green beverage. Up on the I'm not up on the tech bros, latest beverages. But I can imagine that I bet if I search tech beverage, it'll come up.
Yeah. That's But yeah. It's definitely who's folks are doing this. And and and being successful with it, right? So it's it's very possible. On following on from that, I guess something that you mentioned about finding and you've talked about before finding your voice.
And you I think you in your Twitter handle, it says something like I tweet forty times forty plus times a week about marketing, and a couple of other things. How how much can you as a as an individual, as a brand, you know, what you're kind of talking about in that balance there is nailing a niche, right?
And where's that balance between authenticity, versus staying on a prescribed message? You know, like, where it's, where how much do you keep going on your this is what we do? This is a we sell shoes, these are our shoes, or, you know, how much latitude is there?
Is there a is there there's a downside to both, I guess. How do you see all of that? Yeah. So folks will notice that two things tend to be true in in both sort of sharing on social and in content production and amplification, which is essentially that if you stick to the original reason or reasons that people, whatever, subscribed to your email list or followed you on a social network or, you know, got your updates that you tend to perform much better than when you go sort of widely off topic.
That being said, I I personally, right, as a human have broader interests than just marketing and audience intelligence and those kinds of things. And so I am regularly going off topic to, don't know, share a story about my grandmother or talk about a risotto recipe or, you know, whatever it is, knowing that I'll lose some engagement, right?
And that the social algorithms are built on that engagement streak methodology, meaning that your past performance will dictate how well you do in the future or how many people they show your stuff to in the future. This is true on Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and all these places.
The advice that I'd have for brands and for individuals who are who are starting companies or starting content marketing or social marketing initiatives is to just make a decision about what you wanna do. We know how it works and then we can choose how much to engage and optimize for that algorithm versus wanting to do our own thing.
Yeah, yeah. It's, by the way, we had somebody in the chat, Kate Southern, I think in the chat, said that the the tech pro drink is Huel. Is that the one you're talking about? Oh, man. There's one other one. Yes, that is one.
And now you're googling it. So so just on the Soylent reveal. Oh, yes. Soylent. Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah. Even even the name and the movie and all of that. Yeah. I'm probably engaged after this chat. You should look it up. Geraldine Geraldine wrote a blog post on Everywhereist about a week of drinking Soylent.
Nice. Nice. Think I think I'd rather hear about your your cooking lessons in Bologna, but we'll talk about that another time. The so you mentioned engagement streaks and keeping users on the platforms where you're trying to get that you're trying to leverage. And one of the things you mentioned is like, they don't like links, you know, so this is like, we're back into this, this love hate relationship, this battle with the platforms that we're, we're all by creating all the content that you mentioned at the start, you know, we're building the,
we're building their content, we're particularly in something like Facebook or Twitter, we're also building their network. Is are we in a losing game here? Are we eventually that all of these platforms are just going to eat, eat all the marketers on them and you know that you're like, how do we how do we battle that?
Yeah, I think this is this is a really tough thing because visibility on these networks has gone steadily down. Right? So, you know, whatever the engagement rate average page engagement rate on Facebook, you know, five years ago was like two percent, and a lot of people were complaining about that because it had dropped from ten or fifteen percent a few years prior, and now it's zero point zero nine percent.
And we've all just come to accept the fact that you you can barely reach your audience, on Facebook. And so I I think that the way this is going to work is that a few brands and companies and media publications and, you know, meme creators and all those kinds of things will keep doing a good job of reaching and building audiences on these networks.
And for folks who think about them in that way, right? In terms of how do I break through the noise? How do I get something shared that is share worthy and that people wanna amplify and that they have reasons to amplify? And then I can sort of spend some of that currency that I build up, that algorithmic currency that I build up by, you know, sending a link back to my site.
It can still work. I don't know for how long, but yes, all of these platforms wanna keep users on their site because that's how they monetize and they all want to only send traffic off for advertisements. So realistically, if you're whatever working at Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn or Reddit or YouTube or what have you, you don't really want to show those links.
You're only doing it almost as like a historical courtesy or tradition. And the open web is absolutely in danger because of all of this. We just have to keep playing the game as best we can. This is why I so encourage everyone who can to take advantage of these networks now while they're still sending some traffic out and to build up your your website and your email list as a place to you know, as the home and the center of your brand and content.
I think it's really, really dangerous to become, for example, a an exclusive producer of content on YouTube or on Twitter or on TikTok. That is not a user experience that you own. Those aren't customers or visitors that you own. You don't have access to them in the future.
Get them to your site. Get them on your email list. Yeah, it feels like email is the one constant in all of this that sort of never or, you know, over the twenty five years or so that we've been doing this, you know, it's it's it always goes back to it.
But even there, we're seeing some of this, like we're seeing new platforms. Substack is maybe the latest example, where, you know, I'll build a newsletter. That's the new thing, Build a newsletter before it was built a Twitter following or, or, you know, etcetera.
It always keeps moving, keeps evolving. Are we going to see the same problems with Substack? Is this going to be like, oh, they own the news, the mailing list and, you know, are we ah, we should be building on that platform. Yeah. I I I am surprised to see so many folks embracing Substack, very frankly.
I I think that if history has taught us anything, it's that you should own and control that email list a hundred percent. And look, you can you can get everything you want in Substack by custom building your own email newsletter. I don't know.
It feels feels risky to me. Substack, I believe does, you can get as of now the email addresses out so you could export them. You know, could export your subscribers, which is great. That's that's wonderful. Hopefully, that sticks around. I wouldn't expect it to. Right?
I think that if Substack realize you know, realizes they're really onto something and grows, they'll be like all the other networks and eventually shift to a model where they own and control the the user data rather than you. Oh, I would I would build frankly, I would build somewhere else if if I had the option.
Yeah. It kinda goes back to that question that you mentioned about, you can build your own tools, you can put in a little bit of developer time to to circumvent or replace those platforms. And that's kinda where we are, isn't it? It's it's the convenience of a sub stack or a medium, or, you know, any of the social platforms versus the much, much harder, longer route of, you know, just blogging and blogging into the into the the void for a long time maybe.
Yeah. I think about this in terms of, you know, should I send a tweet or should I turn this tweet into a blog post? Right? And I think that's a challenging thing because it is absolutely the case, you know, right now for me personally, and probably for many of folks listening as well, that if you produce a, you know, amplify worthy piece of content on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok, you can reach a far broader audience, right?
So, you know, I send a tweet, chances are good it'll get ten thousand to a hundred thousand impressions on Twitter. Right? So that's a lot of people seeing it. If I put it on my own blog, I'll be lucky to get, you know, Spark Toro's blog much smaller than my old blog at Moz, I'll be lucky to get maybe two thousand five hundred, three thousand people to see that.
That's a pretty well performing blog post on SparkToro. So, you know, the question is, would I rather have those two thousand five hundred visits to my website or do I want twenty five thousand or a hundred thousand people to see this message? And then there's the friction of the creation itself. Right?
So the friction of creating a message on Twitter, a short tweet, very, very tiny, doing a full blog post, quite intensive. Right? It's five to ten hour to put one of those together. And I think the, you know, the the answer for this is different for everyone, but the way I think about it is I wanna build up my audiences on these social networks, and then I wanna spend some of that built up attention and audience that I've got sending, you know, folks over to the most important,
most robust, most kind of worthy bigger pieces on our blog and website and then earning hopefully rankings in Google and sending search traffic there. So this is that's sort of the way I think about it philosophically, but it is it's absolutely a challenge, and I I feel for folks out there who are compelled to, you know, post to Instagram, post to YouTube, post to these other networks, and as a result, probably lose a lot of the potential value they could from putting it on their own site.
Yeah. It's it is that trade, isn't it? You know, the perfectly illustrated by the the views you get on Twitter versus on on the sparktoro blog. What have SEOs kind of created this? There's a there's a philosophical question for SEOs in all this, right?
Like, how much do you our SEO is always making their job harder, the better they get, if you know what I mean? Like, seems like the more SEOs game the system with Google, Google just changes the rules, right? And doesn't tell anybody what the rules are.
Where where does that how does that play out? I mean, to a to a certain extent, yes. Google, obviously, you know, the official, whatever representatives and that kind of stuff, send a lot of misleading or provably inaccurate content out into the world. Right?
But I think what's weird is professional search marketers have sort of learned how to navigate the strange PR speak of Google's representatives and and sort of figure out how their words could be true in a technical sense sometimes. The the weird part about search engine optimization right now is you're sort of in a prisoner's dilemma situation, right, where the more data you give to Google in the ways that they want it, the more content you structure for them, the more you add, you know, your schema markups,
the more you put it into easily consumable formats and and snippets from the page that Google can extract, the more you are cannibalizing your own traffic because Google is trying to answer the search query in the results and prevent searchers from having to visit any pages on the web.
Right? And so Google is in this way really reducing the incentive long term for content creators, but there's so much traffic that Google still sends. Right? I think when I looked with SimilarWeb in, was that December of last year, Google was still sending, you know, seventy, eighty percent plus of all web traffic to other websites.
Right? And the the social networks and Amazon and a few others accounted for, you know, the the sort of tail of it. But it it it was really, really dominated by Google search. So you don't have a lot of options. Right? And and Google essentially gets to keep scraping our websites for free, providing this information for free, and the only recourse you have is to block Google from your site, which is gonna tank your traffic.
So Google knows this. They get to play that game. I think the only the only remedy long term is gonna be some sort of regulation. Otherwise, no individual website owner or collection of website owners is powerful enough to stop Google or to make demands of them.
Let's let's not go down the regulation rabbit hole today. We could be here forever talking about that. But it's, you know, it's definitely a question that I think everybody who's building startup needs to be thinking about more and more over the next few years, we're going to hear more about it.
Yeah, the way I think about is just, you have to get your traffic now. Like you you've got to you've got to just get the traffic now whether whether we're talking about social network traffic or or email newsletters or Google. Right? I think we can all see the writing on the wall.
It's been going this direction for five, six years from all these places. I would just tell anyone building a startup, make sure you are building up your network, your traffic, your, the traffic to your website and your email list now today, because very frankly, I don't know what those opportunities are gonna look like in a few more years.
Yeah, yeah, that's a, it's a good point. And it's a, it's a bit of a dark point to end on. But I guess that that is, that is the direction of travel for the web right now. So we're gonna wrap it up there.
That's that's tons of great stuff between the chat and the and the presentation. Thanks so much. We're gonna have you back. Just for the audience to let everyone know you're coming back on the twelfth, I think it is two and a two and a bit weeks from now.
We'll be chatting. And I think that chat is maybe more going to be a little bit less marketing focus and maybe a bit more about startups in general. And I'm very interested to hear about lessons learned on the start spark Toro journey. But we'll get into that.
There's also, your buddy Chris Savage is going to be here in three weeks time. And Chris is going to be talking about building building your own sort of content machine. So following on a lot actually on what we spoke about today, and obviously Wistia have been very good at that.
Okay, Rand, so that's great stuff. We'll see you in a couple of weeks. But thanks. Thanks for joining us. If anyone has questions for Rand that we didn't get to, which there were a few in there, RandFish on Twitter and he'll I guess you might also be in the in the web app.
So we'll we'll see you see see if you can reach around there. And we'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Rand. Alright. Thanks so much for having me, Brian. Take care, man. See you soon. See you. Alright, so we didn't we didn't get to bring Rand over to Edinburgh for his annual whiskey pilgrimage this year, but perhaps we will again next year.
But so so much to get into there between his his fantastic deep dive really on on where we stand with the duopoly in marketing so much to dig into. So apologies if we didn't get to some of the questions in there. But we'll have ran back as I said on November twelve.
So that, you know, we'll have we'll hear more from them then. So just that's that's it for today. We'll be we'll pop an email in everyone's inbox tomorrow about recapping today, but also talking about the fireside chats for later in the week, and the roundtables.
So we'll catch up again on Thursday, and I'll see you then.
